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Daniel VS. Childhood: Blade

I played a lot of Game Boy games when I was a kid, and I never got any good at them. Fifteen years later, I’m revisiting these games so that I can finally achieve victory. This is Daniel VS. Childhood.

Blade is a man with a problem, namely the fact that everyone hates him. This hate is so intense that no line of dialogue can be bothered with not being about just how much that person hates Blade. Blade, for the Game Boy Color, is just an escalating lesson in all the ways that you can tell someone that you’ll enjoy murdering him, which makes it pretty faithful to the movie. The only thing missing is Blade informing his enemies that they were mistaken when they tried to metaphorically go uphill ice skating.

That said, there’s a wonderful simplicity to Blade that makes it perfect for frustration. The common theme that I’ve noticed in Daniel VS. Childhood so far is that, when I was a kid, I expected there to be some mysterious tactic that I just couldn’t grasp at that age, and when I’d get older, it would suddenly become clear to me. Now, I’m starting to realize that there is no tactic or trick that evaded fourth-grade logic. I’m just awful at a lot of games. And Blade is no different.

I felt let down by this, because I’m a huge fan of Blade and Blade 2, and when I was in the theater, a guy behind me howled at every single one of Triple H’s jokes in Blade: Trinity, so that movie’s not totally horrible either. I wanted so desperately to be good at this game. I could live knowing that Gexisn’t built for people to win, and that Heroes of Might and Magic takes the idea of “fun” and crunches that idea’s spine back on itself. But finally being good at Blade felt like a logical next step in my life. Some of my friends are good at math, and others are good at talking to people, and I can recite the Blade movies and perform the combination of button presses that make beating a fifteen-year-old vampire-kicking simulator look effortless. But it wasn’t meant to be. I am not a Daywalker. I’m more like Donal Logue’s character, who keeps getting his limbs severed because he’s just so inept at everything.

Every Blade level is easy until you reach one of the bosses, whose powers are exponentially greater than whatever you’ve faced prior to them. Half of the enemies in Blade only have the ability to stand there, with the other 49% barely remembering to walk forward too. But that last percent, made up of creatures who can fly and can rain death on you from above, are just exercising the muscle in your brain that recognizes futility. I’ve never thrown a Game Boy, because I imagine that it would just explode, leaving behind only a fortune that reads “You have failed the final test,” but I got close with Blade.